Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday June 28, 2009 @05:46PM
from the horsefeathers-not-yet-ruled-out dept.

pitterpatter writes "A researcher trying to find a use for them claims that after being heated enough to carbonize, chicken feathers hold as much hydrogen as carbon nanotubes do. So chicken feather charcoal might solve the storage problem for the new hydrogen economy. One problem down, half a zillion to go."

The version of the story that I heard was that some British company was building a high speed train and wanted to test it against bird strikes. They borrowed a chicken cannon from an American aerospace company (the cannon being a standard item for testing aircraft canopies) and were horrified to see how much damage the train was taking. The Brits sent the footage to the Americans for review and the Americans simply responded: "Gentlemen, thaw your chickens."

Physics: learn it, use it, benefit from it. (hint: application of kinetic energy would be a starting point to understanding this)

I don't think it's as simple as that.

I'm no physicist but I would suspect that there is a great deal of difference between firing a frozen chicken and a thawed chicken at something. With enough velocity, of course, the differences in outcome will not be very much. But if you give the chickens progressively less velocity at impact, I think you'd find the frozen chickens still penetrate the glass at some levels of kinetic energy where the thawed chickens would not.

My reasoning for this has to do with differences in how the kinetic energy of the chicken is imparted to the windscreen, both through time as well as the area of impact.

The body of frozen chicken will "give" much less than the body of a thawed chicken, so the windscreen has a much shorter period of time to absorb kinetic energy of the chicken. Also, due to that lack of give, the kinetic energy of the chicken's body will be spread over a larger area of the windscreen.

If I drop a 5 kg bag of laundry on my car's windshield from my roof, it will bounce off the windshield and leave it intact. If I drop a 5 kg pipe wrench from the same height, it will most likely shatter the windshield. It's the same idea. With the bag of laundry, the windshield gets more time and more area to absorb the kinetic energy, with the wrench, not as much. Though maybe if I dropped both from a 10 story building, the windshield might not survive it either way.

This isn't simply a matter of an application of equal amounts of kinetic energy. There are a lot of things going on at the point and time of impact that can alter the outcomes... within a certain range of energies.

Also since a frozen (anything) will be able to maintain a higher velocity due to the additional weight of the water as well as aerodynamics and reduced friction of the ice over the air. Keeping the center of mass stationary goes along way of increasing momentum which a frozen object is much more efficient at maintaining.

It's called "impulse". Impulse is how quickly the force is transferred between the objects, which is faster with a solid (ice) chicken than with a thawed one. And then you have the force per area, which is larger with a thawed chicken because it deforms on contact whereas a frozen chicken concentrates almost all the force on a small area.

Adam and Jamie revisited that one after they found that the windshield they used wasn't rated for bird strikes. After the revisit, they did prove that thawed chickens did not penetrate as far as frozen ones. See episode 14 from the 2004 season.

Physics: learn it, use it, benefit from it. (hint: application of kinetic energy would be a starting point to understanding this)

Ok, professor. We'll run an experiment to test this. Assistants will drop water balloons onto each of our heads from a height of 8 meters. I'll test the room temperature balloons, and you can test the frozen ones.

If this is what they teach you in physics then I'm amazed your country has any engineers. It's not just a question of kinetic energy, it's a question of impulse and of elasticity. A frozen chicken is an (almost) inelastic object. A defrosted chicken is not. When a defrosted chicken hits an object, the chicken deforms on impact. The impulse is transferred over the time it takes for the chicken to deform. A frozen chicken will also deform very slightly, but it's almost instantaneous and so the energy will be transferred in a much shorter time. If the frozen chicken deforms for one millisecond and the non-frozen one deforms for two milliseconds then the amount of energy that the windscreen needs to be able to dissipate per unit time is half as much.

There's a simple way you can demonstrate this. First, punch a foam bag as hard as you can. Then punch a concrete wall equally hard. The foam bag deforms as you hit it, while the concrete wall does not. In both cases, you are transferring the same amount of kinetic energy, dissipating it as heat and sound through your arm and the surface, but one of these will hurt a lot more than the other.

Oh, and when you are so obviously wrong that a trivial experiment can demonstrate it, I suggest you be a little less patronising.

0.068 hogshead, assuming one 4 lb. leghorn=2.25 cups by volume(diced), 16 cups to the gallon...we get 7 leghorns per gallon, and 63 gallons/hogshead*, or 442 leghorns/hogshead...thus 3 leghorns would be 0.068 % of a hogshead

I don't know how many hectares you could get out of 0.068 of a hogshead of Leghorns, though. YMMV.That advanced physics is a little outside of my field...I used to raise Easter Egger [wikipedia.org] chickens instead of Leghorns.

*It can get confusing though...at least to me. USA's current definition of a

Feathers are carbohydrates, meaning they are carbon structures with hydrogen and a small portion of oxygen. The Carbonization process cooks off the hydrogen and oxygen, leaving the carbon structure. The hydrogen combines with oxygen to form H20, which is certainly exothermic. My guess is that it produces more heat energy that was consumed to bring it up to carbonization temperature in the first place.

So little or no energy is wasted -- unlike as with solar cells that take 5-10 years to generate as much energy as was used to make them.

Hydrogen will burn just fine in a conventional internal combustion engine. The modifications to a modern gasoline-powered engine to make it run on hydrogen are essentially the same as those to make it run off compressed natural gas. I’m sure many of you have noticed fleet vehicles with a CNG sticker on them; though not widespread, the conversion isn’t exactly uncommon, either.

There are three main problems with converting to hydrogen. First, though hydrogen has much more energy density per unit of mass than gasoline, it has much less energy density per unit of volume in any of the ways it’s currently practically available. Second, for similar reasons, getting a sufficient density of fuel / air mixture to the pistons is a bit of a challenge and generally requires turbocharging, pressurized fuel lines, etc. (Or, you can live with an underpowered vehicle.) The last problem, of course, is producing hydrogen.

If the claims of TFA are accurate, then we may actually be on the verge of solving all three problems.

If we’ll soon see affordable high-capacity tanks, that solves the first problem. The second can be dealt with by making use of many of the high-performance tricks we’re already familiar with.

The last...well, hydrogen can trivially be made by running a current through water. If you’ve got a photovoltaic array on your roof, you can analyze water and get essentially free hydrogen. While we’ll never see cars powered in “real time” by the sun, it’s quite easy make in a couple days as much hydrogen as you’ll need to power your car for a week of normal driving.

Put all these pieces together, and in a few years or so real solar-powered cars may be as common as home-converted home-brewed biodiesel cars are today.

And I assure you sir, I cannot. Or, to put it another way, I will probably opt to spend additional funds to ensure that my vehicle is fun to drive.

On a broader note, I fear that the modern environmentalism is pushing in the wrong direction by becoming ascetic -- by telling us that our wants and desires are bad because they are bad for the environment instead of focusing on way to satisfy those wants in an environmentally friendly way. That philosophy has some appeal to a particular group of people but the majority of Americans (AFAICT) are not particularly receptive to the notion of self-deprivation for the greater good.

Moreover, it's does less practical good to convince people that drives a small car that get ~35MPG to switch to a car that gets 100MPG (a pie-in-the-sky number) than to get someone that drives a 15MPG truck to switch to a more efficient one that gets 25MPG. The former change reduces gas usage over a year (15k mi) by 270 gal, the latter by 400 (the real fault here is that we use the inverse scale, instead of reporting GPM). Doing so, however, requires a change in mindset -- it's not about how we can make an environmentally friendly vehicles, it's about how we can make this vehicle more environmentally friendly without compromising the characteristics that caused people to buy it in the first place.

Focusing on the efficiency of those larger cars & trucks (and sports cars), however, requires ditching the philosophy of asceticism and accepting that many people do not want to drive tiny underpowered cars (and they don't want to stop eating red meat or running the AC either, damnit) and working with them to minimize the impact of the cars they do drive, the meat they do eat and the AC they do run. If we can't get to there from here, then environmentalism will always be something that a few people care very strongly about and the rest of the population cares not at all.

Fortunately, in the auto business, environmentalism and cheap are very closely correlated. Well, that's cheap in the long term which is closely correlated, and our economy clearly shows that we're very good at long term thinking.

Uh, correct me if I'm mistaken, but if reality (i.e. the laws of physics vs. our current tech) says those people can't have what they want then they can't. They don't get to pitch a bitch like a petulant, spoiled child.

The same attitude of "I can have what I want, when I want" as a society caused our current economic crisis. It's not a case of asceticism vs. wanting it all... the laws of nature make it clear that there have to be trade offs and sacrifices. If not immediately, then somewhere down the road.

The problem with this approach is that it conceives our current technology as static -- it's not. The entire point of my post is that we should be focusing our research on new technologies that are not niche-oriented towards environmentalists but tailored to provide what the mass market wants in an environmentally friendly way.

For instance, look at the difference between the (original) Insight and the Prius. The former is, environmentally speaking, a much better car -- it can get 70-80 MPG if you drive it r

But you're still looking only at the relationship between the car and the driver. Your model of sustainability does not take into account the vast infrastructure required to support it. Whether it runs on gasoline or pixie dust, a car is still a car. It still occupies the same amount of space on the roads, in driveways, and in parking lots. It still weighs as much, and therefore requires as much energy (wherever it may come from) to propel.

A model of environmentalism that accepts the idea of more cars is simply NOT sustainable

You had better damn well get used to it! If you think America is an acceptable whipping-boy, just you *wait* till China and India's middle class soars through the stratosphere. To make matters worse, they don't give a damn about environmentalism to the degree it has been accepted in the west.

No. Wrath0fb0b is correct. You're going to have to dance with the Elephant (gracefully I might add) on this issue or else risk being in the path of an impending stampede.

Not all sports cars get shitty mileage.
My 2002 Corvette Z06 gets a combined 24MPG, and routinely hits 28-30MPG on long freeway trips. My previous Vette, a 2000 Z19 hardtop, averaged 25MPG, and got 33MPG on a trip from Phoenix to Minneapolis.
Both of the cars have 5.7L V8 motors and 6-speed manual transmissions. The Z gets worse mileage not because of the extra 50HP/TQ, but because it is geared shorter (roughly 250-350RPM higher at any speed in any gear).
I'm not claiming either car is excellent for fuel

Focusing on the efficiency of those larger cars & trucks (and sports cars), however, requires ditching the philosophy of asceticism and accepting that many people do not want to drive tiny underpowered cars (and they don't want to stop eating red meat or running the AC either, damnit) and working with them to minimize the impact of the cars they do drive, the meat they do eat and the AC they do run. If we can't get to there from here, then environmentalism will always be something that a few people care very strongly about and the rest of the population cares not at all.

No, the important thing is to make sure that people pay the real cost of what they consume. Their behavior would change automatically, and I'm sure it'd be amazing to watch attitudes change after years of selfish subsidization and environmental destruction.

For instance, if you passed a law to stop the agribusinesses from polluting the Mississippi so much that a dead zone the size of New Jersey forms in the Gulf, meat prices would probably triple. If people paid as much at the tank as it costs to maintain our armies in the middle east, gas prices would at least double. Vehicles should be taxed for their wear and tear on our road system. If you want to drive an F350, fine, but since it weighs three times what my car does, you should pay three times as much into the federal tax system to pay for the infrastructure.

I don't care if you have a 20 ounce steak every night and park a fleet of hummers in your front yard. But I do want you to pay their full cost.

Normally I don't reply to trolls, but I found your post spectacularly wrong in so many ways, yet peppered with enough economic and statistical jargon that you might actually convince some people of your false logic should they read it.

First, you fail at economics. Clearly you've taken an undergrad course and heard a few terms. I encourage you to go back and take a few masters level courses so that you understand them a bit better. You also fail at psychology if you truly believe there will be rioting and assassination attempts over the tripling of the price of anything which has substitutes in the marketplace. Just as an example, gasoline has extremely inelastic demand and has quadrupled in price over a few years without any rioting in the streets. Sure, there have been congressional hearings about gas prices because speculators have manipulated the pricing more than OPEC ever has of late, but there are no riots over congresses inaction in passing legislation to encourage the price of gasoline to go down (lower fed. tax rate, drill for more oil, give tax breaks to build a new gasoline refinery, make it illegal to hold futures contracts without a location to store the oil, etc. etc.).

"Meat" includes many products which will be affected differently by any price increase because they will have different elasticities of demand... however, since you've mentioned steak, I thought I'd point out that most economics professors would indeed classify a "standard steak" as a luxury good. It's not as much of a luxury good as say... lobster, but it's up there. Bologna would not be considered a luxury good, but it is a meat product. If a pack of bologna were to triple in cost from $1 to $3, demand would likely drop somewhat and shift to other cheaper sources of protein like soy products. If steak were to also triple from $12 per serving to $36 per serving, demand would likely fall more drastically and shift to other cheaper sources of protein... perhaps even bologna, hot dogs, and hamburgers instead of steak.

You make a LOT of assumptions. I have no idea what sort of tax would have to be imposed on meat products to include the full cost to society and environmental damage, but you assume it would triple the cost of meat in general (wild assumption... could be only a 10% increase which would have little economic impact.) You also assume surpluses and shortages and prices rising or falling, but don't state time frames. In economics, short term, long term, and extreme long term results for shifts can be very different, so your post is vague and sounds a bit like gibberish when you discuss these things. You assume that meat substitute prices will skyrocket without any facts to back up that hypothesis, then go on to say that they may become scarce with a shortage so some people will be forced to buy meat at high prices (another assumption). Do you realize that soy products are cheap and could easily provide a meat substitute even if demand for soy skyrocketed at a very reasonable price? even in the short-term? Have you even heard of price elasticity of demand? Did they not teach you that term in undergrad econ?

On a personal note, I am definitely a fan of meat... but I'm also a fan of taxing the hell out of things that have hidden environmental costs. You'd be surprised at how quickly businesses change their processes to produce less waste when they actually have to pay to clean up that waste. There are economical ways for all businesses to clean up their environmental waste and have a reduced impact on the environment (Note that 100% cleanup would likely cost an infinite amount of money because it is difficult to have exactly zero waste, but perhaps an 85 to 95% reduction might be feasible for some businesses). Yes, prices might rise on goods as companies pass along environmental cleanup costs, but I have no idea how much -- and nor do you unless you've done an environmental impact study on the matter.

Frankly, when you remove the gibberish and wild speculation from your post, it simply reads as "Waaahhhh... I love my meat and I don't want to have to pay more for it!" As you've posted as an anonymous coward, perhaps you already know this is the case.

And honestly, your entire post screams: "since these taxes won't affect me, I am in favour of them, as that will force other people to subsidise my own, different life style choices". You don't want *people* to pay the "full cost" of anything. You want *other people* to pay more for purchases which *you* aren't going to make, under the twisted and erroneous logic that your costs will go down. A very selfish view, given that your main implication is that other people are being too selfish with their consumption.

I hope that clarifies things for you.

No, I don't want any special treatment for anyone. I rarely eat cattle meat because of the environmental impact. When I do, I try to eat cattle meat from a farm where they are grass fed, humanely treated, and not from a cow factory stuffing them with corn and antibiotics. And I drive a small car, but not tiny, since I'm 6'7. Trust me, I understand the want to drive a yacht with a dvd player in the dash. I actually don't fit well in American m

In Australia the debate in some quarters is moving beyond energy efficient cars to energy efficient cities. Some proponents do not even mention peak oil or global warming in their talk, and are NOT proposing "ecocities" even though cars are banned within some of these village-town developments. They are selling it as MORE, not less, because there is MORE community, more local services and shops within walking distance, MORE connection with a MORE secure local economy that is MORE reliable, intimate and connected to servicing other local economy relationships of interdependence. Each dollar coming into a Village-Town circulates through the economy numerous times, and the economy of such simple mechanisms of GOOD TOWN PLANNING also generates 80% of its own economy, creating a more durable local economy during tough times. Existing suburbs can be slowly retrofitted to be car free, as is already happening in Germany. We CAN reclaim the streets, see what is happening in New York. We don't have to be stuck with the current town plan outside your door forever, there are ways to slowly retrofit the world to a post-car model. I'm not saying we totally ELIMINATE the car from all of life, but we can and must massively "discipline" the use of the car. Write to town planners, buy a bike, and... check out what your town's local plans are for peak oil when it hits in a few years.

Presented to the University of New South Wales by Claude Lewenz, I highly recommend the Village Towns movie (15 minutes) where the concept is explained further.

I don't want to have to spend $20 grand every 5 years or so to stay with a current vehicle if my town can be designed to provide most of my needs and I can just walk everywhere, and go HIRE a car on those rare occasions I do need a vehicle. What kind of moronic society continues to build an oil dependent mode of city plan when we are this close to peak oil anyway? The goal should be MORE European than Europe (with Europeans using half the oil of the average American) and further... 20 villages of 500 people each, walled villages with no cars allowed inside, and a local town centre that has the movies, town hall, other facilities. Beautiful, intimate, economically secure, cheaper, safer, cleaner, more fun, less boring, less predictable and more arty: and now GOING MAINSTREAM: not just for eco-village types! (blarrrgh, no thanks!) Yes, this solves global warming and peak oil but you won't hear that from the developer! This is just a better way to live that is MORE fulfilling.
Have fun in your SUV as peak oil hits, or worse, the "uber-expensive" hydrogen economy. I hope it's real fun for you sitting in your high performance vehicle as you speed up to the next traffic jams. Just think: that 10 hours you wasted commuting could have been spent reading a good book, talking to friends as you walk to the local tram stop, or better: arguing with me!;-)

While we'll never see cars powered in "real time" by the sun, it's quite easy make in a couple days as much hydrogen as you'll need to power your car for a week of normal driving.

I think the photovoltaics you'd need to recharge a car in a couple of days are going to be expensive. Let's say your family drives one half hour a day. This is pretty reasonable. A 15 minute commute during the weekd

Obviously, solar cars exist and work, look at the university solar car races that have been going on for years. However, look at those cars and you'll see why unless you develop 80%-efficient PV cells you're not going to be able to make a car you can drive your family around in, handle emergencies, and generally do things a modern gas-powered midsize sedan can do.

According to an interview with a researcher or the lead researcher or something like that, it's not as much as carbon nanotubes or other existing solutions, but it's "enough" and it's vastly cheaper. All existing solutions are impossibly expensive, that's the big deal here. Something like 6 billion pounds of chicken feathers are produced as by products of the chicken industry every year with zero practical reuses.

The same interviewee goes on to explain that there are a number of other possible uses of chicken feathers as a high grade material component, in everything from car body pieces to wind mill blades for wind power. I think it's an excellent effort and I hope it bears fruit.

I don't believe the ten years away figure. Fuel Cell
cars and hydrogen running Internal Combustion engines
are available now. We could start building such cars now,
for example, this Honda Demo Vehicle [scientificamerican.com]
the main infrastructure problem, is having hydrogen gas stations.

-

The idea those sound funny, and i've been laughing at a lot of
the comments here, but chicken feathers are just waste and
nearly free, so what could be cheaper to use for a hydrogen
tank?

I wouldn't say 'about a zillion to go.' I would say one big problem to go. That problem is platinum. We simply have not been able to eliminate the need for platinum in fuel cells to extract the electricity from the reaction of hydrogen and oxygen. Platinum is a huge factor in the cost of the fuel cell and the larger problem is that we simply don't have the amount of it necessary to convert all of the vehicles of the world. I spent a few weeks at Los Alamos with a research group that had been given a hefty grant for finding a solution and all they were doing was shrugging their shoulders at it. It seems nearly hopeless.

The day we find a solution to this problem is, I believe, the day that fuel cells become viable for everyday transportation. I'll be the first in line to swap my motorcycle for a fuel cell powered version because the only problem with fuel cells is their cost per kilowatt. Currently it costs roughly $73 per kilowatt for a fuel cell (source) [wikipedia.org]. This is down from $1,000 in 2002. This means that we've come incredibly far, and we only have one problem to overcome.

I wouldn't say 'about a zillion to go.' I would say one big problem to go. That problem is platinum. We simply have not been able to eliminate the need for platinum in fuel cells to extract the electricity from the reaction of hydrogen and oxygen. Platinum is a huge factor in the cost of the fuel cell and the larger problem is that we simply don't have the amount of it necessary to convert all of the vehicles of the world. I spent a few weeks at Los Alamos with a research group that had been given a hefty grant for finding a solution and all they were doing was shrugging their shoulders at it. It seems nearly hopeless.

I swear, if I had nickel for every alternative energy breakthrough that was announced with great fanfare but went nowhere, I could fund the infrastructure change myself. Do these things just end up fizzling? Are they hoaxes? Is some evil petroleum magnate in a bunker inside a volcano buying them all up and tossing the secrets into the mag

The sooner we forget about hydrogen and get down to actual solutions, the better.

As I said - I'm good with industrialism, but I am NOT down with stupidity. The so-called hydrogen economy is a lie. It is not a solution except to the true believers. We need to make other arrangements, and money spent on hydrogen is mone

That's your argument against hydrogen fuel cells as an energy source? That, since the hydrogen fuel cell was discovered in 1839 it is obviously past any chance of improvement? In that case, we should have given up on fuel oils a long time ago. I mean, oil wells were dug in about 347 by the Chinese and it took till 1847 before someone successfully distilled crude into lantern oil. And EROEI? Complete bullshit metric for the situation. Yes, it is a great guide to the feasibility of a system. But we know that

What most people don't seem to understand is that the environmental problem with burning hydrocarbons (gasoline, diesel, etc.) *is not* with the act itself. My point being that the principle of the Internal Combustion Engine isn't the problem.

The problem is where the hydrocarbons come from. Right now, the feedstock for hydrocarbon based fuel production is petroleum. That petroleum is happy underground and would stay that way virtually indefinitely *if* we didn't pump it to the surface.

That brings us to the problem: When we burn hydrocarbon fuels based on petroleum, we are adding carbon to the atmosphere that was locked underground. However, *if* we burn hydrocarbon based fuels that are synthetically created using (among other things) recaptured Carbon from the air, then we are *not* adding to the CO2 load of the planet and therefore can focus on more immediate environmental problems.

It's going to happen sooner or later. However much petroleum there is in the ground (20 years or 200), it is for sure and certain that *one* day it will run out. We're eventually going to have no choice but to switch to a hydrogen economy and I've seen *nothing* on the drawing board (even far flung into the future) that matches the energy potential of hydrocarbons.

Their surface areas per unit mass (smaller than 1,000 m^2/g) are not too impressive (since storage is done by physisorption on the surface). This will not produce sufficient adsorption. Activated carbon from corn-cobs appear to offer more promise (migger than 3,000 m^2/g) and are also quite cheap. See, for example from my home state: http://www.physorg.com/news162195986.html [physorg.com]

One good reason to have cars powered by chicken feathers is that chicken feathers are one of only two substances that may lawfully be littered upon the public streets and highways. Cal. Vehicle Code 23114(a). So once their fuel value is depleted, just dump 'em on the road.

PETA has only ever said one thing that I agree with: When they wanted Ben & Jerry's to switch to human breast milk they said 'The breast is the best'. However, unlike PETA, I prefer the packaging to the contents...

This is the same PETA that complained about President Obama killing a fly! What kind of message would it send to Kim Il Jong and Osama Bin Laden and the rest of the worlds baddies if the President had to get his fly trap to humanely catch and release the fly instead of swatting the little bu